A Better World Articles

As part of MIT Sounding, Haitian rapper, poet and singer BIC performs his work in collaboration with Jean Appolon Expressions, a Cambridge-based Haitian contemporary dance company. Photo by Caroline Alden.

Performer BIC Shares the Joy of Music and Poetry to Promote Social Equity

The Haitian poet and rapper discusses the rich outcomes of a week-long residency at MIT. Can art, poetry and music generate social change? That question was  enthusiastically explored this April during a visiting artist residency with Haitian poet and rapper … Continued

First Place 2019 $15K Creative Arts Competition team Teach to Learn. Credit: HErickson/MIT.

$15K Creative Arts Competition 2019

Teach to Learn wins $15,000 first prize Mark Adams (Sloan School of Management ’19) worked in agriculture in Zambia. Derek Beckvold taught music in a refugee camp outside of Erbil in Iraq. Robert Jordon gave piano lessons to young people … Continued

Image: Guillermo Bernal. Courtesy of the artist.

2019 Winners of the Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts

Guillermo Bernal, Erin Genia, Emily Toomey, and Dipo Doherty Every artist’s body of work represents their creative vision and artistic evolution. For younger artists, a portfolio also points to their future potential. Winners of the 2019 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer … Continued

A mural from The House of Correction AR Mural Project. The project is an ongoing collaboration between The Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department and several groups at MIT including Music and Theater Arts, The Borderline Mural Project, The Educational Justice Institute (TEJI), and Arts at MIT. Credit Leon Yim.

MIT Students Find Rich Rewards in Working on the HOC AR Mural Project

The community project provided a close up of prison life and revealed the power of art to inspire and transform. When MIT freshman Sherry Xiao and MIT junior Helen Read signed up to participate in the House Of Correction Augmented … Continued

Drunk and...soon to be FAMOUS!!! Featuring Shasta Geaux Pop Shot & Edited by Tatiana McCabe.

Shasta Geaux Pop Raises the Roof and Opens the Cultural Floodgates

Reserve your ticket to Line by Line, part of the MIT Performing series February 15, 2019 / 8:00pm MIT Theater Building W97, 345 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA Ayesha Jordan brings her mega-party persona and work-in-progress to MIT Performing When Shasta … Continued

Image: Ben Bloomberg SM '14. Credit Justin Knight.

Sound and Technology Unlock New Innovation at MIT

Sound is a powerfully evocative medium, capable of conjuring authentic emotions and unlocking new experiences. This fall, several cross-disciplinary projects at MIT probed the technological and aesthetic limits of sound, resulting in new innovations and perspectives, from motion-sensing headphones that … Continued

NERVOUS/SYSTEM by Andrew Schneider and Company: Jamie Roach. Photo by Sham Sthankiya.

Andrew Schneider’s NERVOUS/SYSTEM Boldly Launches the Inaugural Season of MIT Performing

Bringing Andrew Schneider and Company to MIT Albert Einstein once said of his teaching style, “I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” That quote essentially describes how OBIE award-winning performer, … Continued

Flocks. Credit LNichols.

Transforming a Rough Childhood in Rural Louisiana into a Graphic Novel

L. Nichols will present a reading of his new work “Flocks,” 
an autobiographical graphic novel, on Tuesday, November 27, 2018 from 5:00-6:15pm in the MIT Wiesner Student Art Gallery. The reading will include an introduction by Stephen Tapscott, Professor, Literature and … Continued

Spaceus, Roslindale, 2018. Photo: Spaceus.

Spaceus Proposes a New Lease on the Creative Life of the City

“Those things that we do not value, that we do not actively protect, fade away and die,” writes Kevin Baker in “Death of a Once Great City,” an article in Harper’s about New York’s affluence crisis. Baker describes the one-time … Continued

Nader Tehrani and Gediminas Urbonas, Liquid Archive, 2011. Photo: Andy Ryan.

Integrating the arts and humanities at MIT, then and now

“In our increasingly complex society, science and technology can no longer be segregated from their human and social consequences. The most difficult and complicated problems confronting our generation are in the field of the humanities and social sciences.” This declaration, … Continued

2018 Creative Arts Competition Winner, 1st place, Project Daredevil (Hapticomix).

2018 Creative Arts Competition supports arts-focused startups from idea to impact

On April 30, MIT’s yearlong suite of opportunities for student arts entrepreneurs culminated in the sixth annual Creative Arts Competition, a $15,000 prize for the most promising arts-focused startup at the Institute. Eight teams were selected as finalists (from 23 … Continued

2017 $15K Creative Arts Competition Workshop. Credit Lenny Martinez.

In Good Company: MIT Alumni in Creative Industries

Bose, BuzzFeed, E*Trade, Gillette, Huffington Post, Texas Instruments, Zipcar—those are just a few familiar companies founded by MIT alumni. With MIT’s “lab to market” ethos, it may come as no surprise that thousands of alumni have turned their research findings … Continued

The Lightweaver, photomontage of a kinetic light installation for the Future Heritage Lab at the refugee camp Al Azraq, Jordan by Azra Aksamija / FHL. Credit: Azra Aksamija, The Lightweaver, 2017.

Future Heritage Lab Devises Creative Responses to Humanitarian Crises

Artistic Collaboration Between MIT, German-Jordanian University and Refugees in the Al Azraq Camp in Jordan Associate Professor Azra Akšamija, Art, Culture & Technology Program, MIT Department of Architecture, first visited the Al Azraq refugee camp in Jordan in 2016. “Once … Continued

2017 Hacking Arts. Credit: Blanco Gomez.

Hacking Arts 2017 asks “Why human?”

The 2017 Hacking Arts Festival, which took place at MIT on November 10-12, centered on a timely theme, “Why human?” A surfeit of recent articles report an increasing skepticism about digital technologies among millennials. As retreating into tech-enabled virtual worlds … Continued

Bryan Czibesz and students observing 3D printer in action. Credit: Jay Pastorello.

Object Lesson: 3D Ceramics Printer

Object Lesson is a new blog series that highlights some of the art, artifacts, machines, devices, books, instruments and tools that give physical form to ideas that enhance the MIT campus and community.   3D CERAMICS PRINTER What is a … Continued

Lou Harrison. Courtesy of the artist.

MIT’s Sounding Concert Series Is All About Coming Together

This fall sees the return of the MIT Sounding series—and, as usual, a penchant for border crossings and experimentation. The season kicks off on October 12 with a tribute concert to the influential composer Lou Harrison, who would have turned 100 … Continued

Roots Studio, 2017 Winner of the Creative Arts Competition. Authentic designs by artists in India are transformed into storied products. Photo: Courtesy of Roots Studio.

Creative Arts Competition rewards arts entrepreneurship at MIT

On May 1, MIT’s yearlong suite of opportunities for student arts entrepreneurs culminated in the fifth annual Creative Arts Competition, a $15,000 prize for the most promising arts-focused startup at the Institute. Eight teams, comprised of undergraduate and graduate students … Continued

Guillermo E. Brown. Bee Boy, directed by Charlotte Brathwaite, MIT 2017. Credit: Dekoit Pictures.

Bee Boy uplifts in the face of inequity’s sting

The word Ba, represented by a bee-sign in hieroglyphs, meant ‘soul,’ ‘honey’ and ‘bee’ to Ancient Egyptians. This ancient commingling of our fate with bees isn’t lost on MIT assistant professor of theater arts Charlotte Brathwaite, whose new project Bee … Continued

NoteStream app in use at the Blackstar concert. Photo: Justin Knight.

The concert program gets a digital makeover fit for Bowie

When I was an art student in New York in 1999, David Bowie visited our school and offered to host images of our work on BowieNet, an ISP he had launched the previous year. Glimpsing Bowie was enough to blow … Continued

Being Material Conveners March for Science Statement

A statement from the symposium conveners:   “BEING MATERIAL—and being digital, for that matter—demands that we be with science and engineering, both in the sense of standing with the scientific method and its results as well as in the sense … Continued

Protein 13 (Postscript 2013) - The Power Plant. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Poetry to survive the end of civilization

The recent spike in sales of George Orwell’s 1984, which hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list last week, says something about our dystopian times. If the future gets bleaker, we’ll need literature that not only records civilization’s collapse, but … Continued

Hacking Arts Festival, 2016.

Hacking Arts Festival 2016 Merges Art, Tech and Entrepreneurship

“We’re not just talking about the future of the arts—we’re creating it,” says Helen Smith, MIT Sloan MBA Class of 2017 and co-chair of Hacking Arts 2016. Igniting cross-disciplinary innovation, Hacking Arts brings together artists, engineers and entrepreneurs to take … Continued

"Hajanga," is the fourth and final single from Collier's debut album, 'In My Room'.

Behind the Artwork: Ben Bloomberg Creates Live Performance Systems for Virtuoso Multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier

CAST Visiting Artist Jacob Collier is well known for his YouTube videos, which the 22-year-old musical phenom performs and produces in his bedroom in North London. Collier’s work has garnered praise from such jazz icons as Herbie Hancock and Quincy … Continued

"Don't You Know," an original song from Jacob Collier's debut album 'In My Room'. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Jazz Prodigy Jacob Collier Infuses Technology with Humanity at MIT

Explosively rhythmic music Jacob Collier is not like other YouTube stars. The English 22-year-old rose to fame with inventive video covers of popular songs like Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T.” and Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” the arrangements rendered in dizzying multiplicity … Continued

Young Guru, 2015. Photo: Jared Fullerton, courtesy of the artist.

“Design and Destruction”: Young Guru inaugurates Hip Hop Speaker Series

A couple familiar red and white bags from the COOP bursting with MIT textbooks sat in a corner of the green room while legendary audio engineer and DJ, Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton, talked to the press before his recent lecture … Continued